Though the title of Lifehacker’s post is tasteless, it gets to the point: that too many presentations fail to have the impact they should. Too many teachers and professors, people who are professional communicators speaking to groups, do so not very well. The post covers five key problems and offers solutions for them:

1. Too Many Ideas on One Slide


2. Clichés and Clipart


3. Lack of Emphasis


4. Random Design Choices


5. No Relationship to the Audience

So read up on how to reduce the suckage in your presentations!
How to Create Presentations that Don’t Suck – Lifehacker.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog points to the iMuscle iPad app, saying it’s a “must for exercise aficionados.”

With iMuscle, users can select virtually any muscle in the human body and see a list of exercises and stretches for that muscle. However, that feature in itself is nothing new or groundbreaking as many apps do the same thing. What is unique about this app is that it uses the 3D Nova engine to show users animations of the exercises using a model with exposed musculature. Think Body Worlds brought to life.

In addition to more than 450 high-quality 3D animated exercises and stretches, you can create custom workouts and the app even supports multiple users. Anyone who is into sports training or rehabilitation science will immediately see the usefulness of this app. After all, instead of telling a client they need to work on their butt muscles, it’s a lot more helpful to tell them that they specifically need to work their glute med and be able to show them a 3D model of its anatomical location and what it looks like in action.

I haven’t used it; I’m only pointing to the article, but I would guess that the folks in our Kinesiology and Health department might find this of interest.

Well isn’t this interesting? A presenter can mirror the iPad screen wirelessly – what could teachers do with this? Very impressive, and apparently they spent only about $150.

Teachers and corporate presenters alike begged Apple for video mirroring capabilities for the iPad, and the company delivered the feature in the iPad 2. Apple’s solution still leaves users tied to a cord, however, so two employees at networking service provider Straight Up Technologies developed a simple hack to give their client wireless HDMI output and freedom of movement while sharing the iPad’s screen.

via iPad wireless HD mirroring hack makes for better presentations.

http://www.cio.de/news/cio_worldnews/2245531/?qle=rssfeed_

Inkling is definitely going to shake things up. iPad only.

calibre plus Sigil equals formatting for epub, which works in iBooks for iPad and iPhone, and maybe for books for your students and your school!

Via Macintouch.

Before I get to the mechanics of everything in this post, I want to say a bit about why to do all this, and it’s much more than “branding” yourself. I had not long before found a post on 3 Quarks Daily, a group blog on current affairs, about thinking and working in this new economy and this new century. It was a link to an interview and podcast with Seth Godin, an unconventional marketing consultant and author. In this service economy, most of us have to provide something unique—there are videographers and editors all over. To be successful, Godin asserts that we have do our work as an artist would, to add ourselves in essential ways to what we do. After listening to this podcast a few times, and starting to read his blog, I’ve tried to consciously bring more of that attitude to what I do, and I encourage you to do that as well, and tell the story of it through social media. Now, to the links:

We talked of course about Facebook, and we also looked at this Mashable page about its privacy issues. There is of course Twitter, and I briefly pointed to this article about ways to use Twitter for business. Our own Carl Marxer provided a link on the spot to his own advice on using Twitter and other social media.

We focused mainly on LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals. Mashable, linked above, also had a page about searching for jobs on LinkedIn.

MCA-I member Jose Acosta explained how he’s found clients through Facebook as well as his LinkedIn page, and showed his SmugMug portfolio site. Looks nice!

I showed how easy it is to get a good, free blog for creating a website at WordPress.com. There are other options, of course, but I’m familiar with WordPress and it has a huge user base. I showed this article for using WordPress to set up a professional site and weblog.

Posterous is another site offering free blogs, and is easy to update via email. Educational Technologist Tony Vincent explains some features of Posterous here

An example with real relevance for media professionals is Steve Bransford’s blog, Downhome Traces. Steve regularly posts video of historians and long-time Atlanta residents sharing the history and their memories of Atlanta. It’s an absorbing site, offering interesting insight into our local scene, and a great showcase for his skills.

Other example sites: The DV Show, with regular informative posts and sometime video interviews with filmmakers, videographers, and equipment manufacturers.

Finally, that day I showed how relevant blogs and social networks can be, showcaseing Mac-watcher John Gruber’s Daring Fireball site, and his pointers to that day’s announcement of Google’s open-sourcing the VP8 video codec, and the new cloud storage service from Google. Both of these could have big impacts on how video professionals post and store video for online use.

An exhaustive list, nicely categorized, of blogs with valuable resources for policy makers, teachers, professors, grad students, educational technologists and anyone with a serious interest in where education is going.

Whether you want to be a teacher, principal or even an educational policy-maker, learning all you can about the field and how to be a more powerful leader while you’re still in college is essential. These blogs will fill you in on the latest news, provide inspiration, and ensure that you are up-to-date with the latest educational technologies so you can be the best education leader you can be.

Thanks, Karenne!

Other great resources after the jump.

YouTube has many videos about LinkedIn – this brief intro explains it very well.

LinkedIn’s Learning Center is the place to begin for more understanding of how it works and what it can mean, and for getting your profile started.

Among the good advice is Tony Karrer’s eLearning Technology blog. He compiled a rich collection of links in the post LinkedIn Guide for Knowledge Workers. (Arent’ teachers the original knowledge workers?) The links run from basic tutorials, to questioning his own assumptions about how to use LinkedIn, to finding expert level answers.

A few years ago, he posted Getting Value from LinkedIn. You’ve got a specific question about your work—ideas for handling a unique student problem, or operating an unusual combination of technologies (often brought about by aging equipment, declining budgets, and the need to get something done), or a fresh look at an often-used lesson plan – who can you ask? A well-maintained LinkedIn network offers assistance from active professionals who’ve made it clear they want to answer questions like that. We know they’re willing to help because they’re on LinkedIn.

Twitter interacts with LinkedIn, and with some new apps like Tweetdeck”:http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ so does Facebook. The recent and increasingly popular Posterous lets a single email update post go to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

There’s a lot of social media opportunities, and they take some getting used to, but it’s time well spent. As a pro, you should want to stay connected personally and professionally with a wide variety of people, to offer what you can and to find out what you need.

Great resource for making your presentation slides look better. Remember though – your presentation is not your talk! Design comes after writing what you’ll say.

Lifehacker—SlideFinder Helps You find Inspiration for Your Next Powerpoint Presentation.